Today is the North American release day for Dragon Age II, BioWare's role-playing sequel, which will be available in Europe on Friday. In addition to the retail edition, the game is also available online from the EA Store, Direct2Drive, GamersGate, Impulse, and Steam. Also, the BioWare Social Network offers a high-resolution texture pack for the game. Here's word on the 1.08 GB patch: "Using high-resolution textures requires a graphics card with at least 1024MB video memory. Most of the benefits from the Hi-resolution textures will only be seen if you are able to run the game in DirectX 11." For those interested in sampling the game, a playable demo was released last month.

entr0py wrote on Mar 8, 2011, 17:26:Really enjoying the game so far. Some of the changes are definitely good, such as the inventory management and crafting overhauls. Losing the floaty overhead cam continues to suck, especially on nightmare. Managing agro and crowd control are now particularly vital, due to the new interrupt and knockback systems. Mages are still awesome, but they're now much more vulnerable, while rogues and archers have become a lot more useful in combat.

As I suspected, people were reading WAY too much into the demo. "What, stealth, lockpicking/trap disarming, injury kits, poisons ect. weren't in the 20 minute demo? They must not exist!"

And people wonder why demo's aren't released. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.